1956-1958, University of London, Institute of Psychiatry, research
fellow

1958-1966, University of California, Berkley, professor, research
psychologist at Institute of Human Learning (1961- ), and professor of
educational psychology (1966- )

Major Contributions

Major proponent of the hereditarian position

Ideas & Interests

Arthur Jensen is a prominent educational psychologist who is best known
for a controversial essay on genetic heritage that was first published in
the February 1969 edition of the Harvard Educational Review. In the
late 1950s, he did postdoctoral research in London with Hans J. Eysenck,
one of England's leading psychologists. "Like Eysenck, Jensen is a
differential psychologist-- that is, one 'most concerned with how and why
persons differ behaviorally from one another, as they so obviously do.' He
was particularly influenced by the English psychologist's quantitative and
experimental approach to personality research "(Moritz, p. 210).Upon
returning to the United States, Jensen became a research and professor at
the University of California, Berkley, where he focused on individual
differences in learning, especially the influences of culture,
development, and genetics on intelligence and learning. He has
concentrated much of his work on the learning difficulties of culturally
disadvantaged students.

Around 1962, Jensen began extensive testing of black, Mexican-American,
and other minority-group school children, developing a series of
"culturally-free" intelligence tests that could be administered
in any language. The results of that program soon led him to distinguish
between two separate types of learning ability (or intelligence): Level I,
or associative learning, may be defined as simple retention of input--that
is, rote memorization of simple facts and skills; Level II, or conceptual
learning, is roughly equivalent to the attribute measured by I.Q.
tests--the ability to manipulate and transform inputs--that is, the
ability to solve problems.

Statistical analysis of his findings led Jensen to conclude that Level
I abilities were distributed equally among members of all races, but that
Level II occurred with significantly greater frequency among whites than
among blacks (and among Asians somewhat more than among whites). (Moritz,
p. 211)

Because of these and other study results, Jensen was convinced, as had
been the English psychologist Cyril Burt, that 80 percent of intelligence
is based on heredity, and 20 percent on environment. As a result, he was
convinced that intelligence is fundamentally an inherited trait. Jensen
concluded "that the well-known differences in performance on
intelligence tests of American blacks and white, with whites as a group
regularly scoring higher than blacks as a group at all social-class
levels, were due to inherent and essentially unchangeable intellectual
differences between the two races, rather than to the effects of poverty,
discrimination, and similar remediable factors (Moritz, p. 211)."
Many perceived Jensen's finding as racist and he set off an intense
controversy with the 1969 publication of his genetic research results in a
123-page article in the Harvard Educational Review. "The sound and
the fury surprised and puzzled Jensen, who felt his findings were of vital
importance, and who had intended to open up for objective discussion a
subject that, he believed, had been too long swept under the rug. (Moritz,
p. 211)"

Jensen continued to research racial and hereditary influences on
intelligence. In his 1979 book, Bias in Mental Testing, he
presented the values and validity of mental tests. Jensen concluded,

"None of these attempts to create highly culture-reduced tests had
succeeded in eliminating, or even appreciably reducing, the mean
differences between certain subpopulations--race and social class. . . .
It's better to reply on a test than on the whims of an interviewer or
employer. The tests are color blind, and that should be reassuring. (Evory,
p. 353)"

Publications

Social Class, Race, and Psychological Development with M.
Deutsch and I. Katz (1968)